Mystery

Spotlight – Glendy Vanderah

Click here to return to the series Intro Glendy Vanderah, who has worked as a field biologist, endangered bird specialist, editor, and writer brings her vast love of nature into her popular novels. Her first novel, Where the Forest Meets the Stars, has over 120,000 positive ratings on Goodreads. Her […]

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Good Neighbors, Sarah Langan

Climate change is wreaking havoc, adding its own sinister atmosphere to Maple Street, when a huge toxic sinkhole opens up in the neighborhood’s green space. –NWI Times Celeste Ng’s enthralling dissection of suburbia meets Shirley Jackson’s creeping dread in this propulsive literary noir, when a sudden tragedy exposes the depths […]

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Waiting for the Night Song, Julie Carrick Dalton

A startling and timely debut, Julie Carrick Dalton’s Waiting for the Night Song is a moving, brilliant novel about friendships forged in childhood magic and ruptured by the high price of secrets that leave you forever changed. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads

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Leave the World behind, Rumaan Alam

When the end of the world as we know it comes about in Rumaan Alam’s gripping third novel, Leave the World Behind, the two families brought together in the indulgent surroundings of a Long Island country retreat feel, well, uneasy. There’s no big moment, no flash of white light, alien […]

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Operation Redwood, S. Terrell French

Middle Grade Fiction Reviewed by Kimberly Christensen Shuffled off to his aunt and uncle’s house in San Francisco while his mom takes a work assignment in China, everything looks bleak for 12-year-old Julian Carter-Li. No one besides his cousin and his best friend seem to care much about what happens […]

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Elatsoe, Darcie Little Badger

Little Badger’s debut novel, “Elatsoe”… is a young adult fantasy about a 17-year-old Lipan Apache girl who can awaken the ghosts of dead animals and sets out to solve her cousin’s murder. –New York Times Goodreads Reviews Back to Goodreads

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Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

It’s difficult to highlight the eco-horror in this one without spoiling the twist, but suffice it to say, the Doyles have a hefty supernatural secret. In Mexican Gothic, the horror isn’t in nature turning against people but is in the way that extraction of natural resources helps entrench colonial powers […]

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Trace Elements, Donna Leon

In “Trace Elements,” a character who worked in the field collecting samples of contamination for a company that measures the cleanliness of Venice’s water supply dies in a mysterious motorcycle accident. –Wisconsin State Journal Trace Elements is the 29th book in the Commissario Brunetti series.. Goodreads Reviews Back to GoodReads

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The Second Sleep, Robert Harris

It’s within this strange and ambiguous historical setting that Harris has also fashioned a cautionary tale for today — a tale over which the 21st century perils of climate change and unfettered technology cast an unsettling shadow. –OCanada.com All civilisations think they are invulnerable. History warns us none is. 1468. […]

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Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk

Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (originally titled Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych). Man Booker International Prize Nominee (2019). Olga is also a Nobel prize winner in literature as well as the Nike in Poland. This tale of an elderly female eccentric investigating the murders of humans and animals in a remote forest […]

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Disappearing Earth, Julia Phillips

It’s possible, though, that novelists are responding to the effects of climate change in ways other than direct representation…Julia Phillips’s brilliant debut novel “Disappearing Earth” is what Jane Allison calls a “radial” narrative — one where some inciting incident creates ripples that move outward and often compound in complexity rather […]

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Where Oceans Hide their Dead, John Yunker

The long-awaited sequel to The Tourist Trail…Robert Porter has quit the FBI in search of his long-lost (and presumed dead) love, Noa, only to find himself on the wind-raked shores of Southern Africa working for a seal-rescue organization. When a confrontation with local sealers ends in murder, Robert must abandon […]

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The River, Peter Heller

The real delight is the nature writing. The River is a fiction addition to the New Landscape writing of Robert Macfarlane and Rebecca Solnit, prose so vivid and engaging that a city-dwelling reviewer can feel the clammy cold of a fog over a river or the heat of subterranean tree roots […]

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A Jenny Willson Mystery Series, Dave Butler

The first in Butler’s series of novels – Full Curl – was short-listed for the Kobo Emerging Writers Award in the mystery category, and won the coveted Arthur Ellis Award (Crime Writers of Canada) for Best First Crime Novel in Canada in 2018. No Place for Wolverines, which was named […]

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Beneath the Mother Tree, D.M. Cameron

A spine-chilling mystery and contemporary love story, Beneath the Mother Tree plays out in a unique and wild Australian setting, interweaving Indigenous history and Irish mythology…On a small island, something sinister is at play. Resident alcoholic Grappa believes it’s the Far Dorocha, dark servant of the Faery queen, whose seductive […]

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